Luke Addison is a 26-year-old peace activist. His peace work started at University where he was studying English and Drama and quickly became interested in using Drama as a tool for tackling and reflecting on local and international social issues. Through his Drama workshops he has worked with elderly, vulnerable youth, and refugees, and used Drama as a way to explore and reflect on key issues, looking at both sides of an issue and resolutions. Through his Drama and Peace education work, he became involved with Rotary International and soon set up a Youth group at the University working to solve local and international issues. He soon became the National Chair for Rotaract UK and it was through this that he was introduced to the organisation PeaceJam, an international peace education group working with youth and Nobel Peace Laureates. He and others set a PeaceJam up at the University of Winchester and held their fifth annual conference in March this year with another confirmed next year. He is also the Vice-Chair of Uniting for Peace, an NGO that has been working since 1979 to create and promote a global culture of peace, non-violence, and poverty reduction. He is a very active committee member, working to organise events, seminars and workshops alongside Chair Vijay Mehta. Alongside his peace work, he works as a Carer for the elderly, a Journalist and a Poet.
Leah Bolger retired in 2000 from the U.S. Navy at the rank of Commander after twenty years of active duty service. Her career included duty stations in Iceland, Bermuda, Japan and Tunisia and in 1997, was chosen to be the Navy Military Fellow at the MIT Security Studies program. Leah received an MA in National Security and Strategic Affairs from the Naval War College in 1994. After retirement, she became very active in Veterans For Peace, including election as the first woman national president in 2012. Later that year, she was part of a 20-person delegation to Pakistan to meet with the victims of U.S. drones strikes. She is the creator and coordinator of the “Drones Quilt Project,” a traveling exhibit which serves to educate the public, and recognize the victims of U.S. combat drones. In 2013 she was selected to present the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Memorial Peace Lecture at Oregon State University. Currently she serves as the President of the Board of Directors of World BEYOND War. Find her on FaceBook and Twitter.
Born in 1954 in West Germany, Heinrich Buecker moved to West Berlin after finishing school in 1973, in order to not be drafted into the Bundeswehr, the West German military, which was compulsory at the time. West Berlin back then was a haven for many trying to stay away from a re-emerging German militarism, since the city was off limits for the Bundeswehr. Between initial construction jobs, political activism, some university studies, and extensive travelling Heinrich started to build a moving business, and went on to sell antiques at fleamarkets and antique-shows. In between he travelled in many countries, worked as a taxi driver, sold souvenirs at the Berlin Wall, and in the early 90s moved to Japan, where he went on selling at fleamarkets for a few years. In 2000 he came back to Berlin, soon got active in the anti-war movement, organized a Peace Camp in front of the U.S. Embassy when the war against Iraq started in 2003, created an anti-war gallery at the legendary Tacheles Arthouse, and in 2005 opened the Coop Anti-War Cafe in downtown Berlin, which has become a hub for local and international peace campaigns, activists, and artists. For the past few years Heinrich has been actively involved in the World BEYOND War movement and represents WBW in Berlin.
Glenda Cimino was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and studied and lived in Florida, South America, and New York City before moving to Ireland in 1972. She currently lives in Dublin. At times a sociologist, a teacher, a publisher, a poet, a social historian, an actor, a journalist, an editor, a filmmaker, and a home carer, she is now a freelance writer and an activist with the Irish Anti-War Movement and a supporter of People before Profit. She has been involved with anti-racist, anti-nuclear, pro-environment and anti-war activities since the 1960s. In the famous rebellions of 1968, she was a grad student at Columbia University and partook in the protests there, and was in a street theatre group in NYC. She joined marches on Washington many times. In 1970 she cut sugar cane in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade and later contributed to a book about the experience. In Ireland, she has spoken out at anti-war demos, been interviewed on radio, chaired IAWM panel discussions, given talks and run workshops. She believes that war itself should be treated as a crime, that we need to make urgent, major changes in the way we live on this planet, and that war – not other people – is the enemy of humanity and the environment. She plays a very small part in a very big struggle for equality, justice, respect for all life on earth, and peace.
Roger Cole is Chair of the Peace & Neutrality Alliance which was founded in 1996 to advocate the right of the Irish people to have their own independent foreign policy, with positive neutrality as its key component, pursued primarily through a reformed United Nations. He was Chief Steward and one of the main organisers of the over 100,000 march in Dublin on the 15th of February 2003 against the Iraq War. He campaigned actively against the Amsterdam, Nice, and Lisbon treaties which have integrated Ireland into the EU/US/NATO military structures. Roger Cole seeks to build a Europe including Russia which is a Partnership of Sovereign States without a military dimension and to reaffirm the role of the United Nations as the only inclusive global institution with responsibility for peace and security.
Clare Daly is an Irish politician who has been a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Ireland for the Dublin constituency since July 2019. She is a member of Independents 4 Change, part of the European United Left–Nordic Green Left. She served as a Teachta Dála (TD) from 2011 to 2019. Clare has been a leading campaigner over many years on human rights issues including access to abortion and the Right2Water, and a consistent voice in favour of Irish neutrality and against U.S. military use of Shannon Airport. She has been at the forefront of fighting for reform of An Garda Síochána and against garda malpractice. In 2014 she and her colleague Mick Wallace were arrested for attempting to gain access to a military aircraft at Shannon airport in order to prove once and for all the presence of military weapons on U.S. aircraft passing through Ireland. She continues to campaign against the erosion of Irish neutrality and against U.S. warmongering and imperialism.
Pat Elder is a member of World BEYOND War’s Board of Directors. He is the author of Military Recruiting in the United States, and the Director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy. The coalition works to counter the alarming militarization of the United States’ high schools.
Pat also writes for World BEYOND War and Civilian Exposure, an organization that tracks how the military poisons people around the world. Pat’s focus is on documenting contamination caused by the U.S. military’s use of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in routine fire-fighting drills.
Joseph Essertier organizes Japan for a World BEYOND War. Joseph is an American living in Japan who began actively opposing war in 1998 during the Kosovo War. Subsequently, he came out against Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in 2016 the construction in Henoko and Takae that anti-base Okinawans have tenaciously resisted and successfully slowed down. He has recently written and spoken about Japanese activists who educate their fellow citizens about history and resist denialism surrounding the Asia-Pacific War. His research has mostly focused on language reform movements between the 1880s and 1930s in Japan that facilitated democracy, inclusivity, cultural diversity in Japan and abroad, and writing by women. He is presently an associate professor at the Nagoya Institute of Technology.
Laura Hassler is Founder and Director of Musicians Without Borders. She grew up in a multicultural, artistic community in New York, a child of two professionals in the international peace and nonviolence movement. Active from an early age in the U.S. civil rights and peace movements, she studied cultural anthropology and music at Swarthmore College, combining academics with activism and music. During the 1970s she worked for the Friends (Quaker) Peace Committee and the Committee of Responsibility on Vietnam in Philadelphia; for Thich Nhat Hanh’s Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation in Paris; and the U.S. Fellowship of Reconciliation in New York. Laura moved to the Netherlands in 1977, where she developed a career as a musician, linking music to social causes. She specialized in cultural diversity in the arts, founded a World Music School and worked as a diversity consultant to arts institutions while teaching singing and leading vocal groups. Part of a large network of socially conscious musicians, Laura mobilized this network to create Musicians Without Borders in 1999. Today, still drawing largely on the talents of this ever-broadening network, Musicians Without Borders has become one of the world’s pioneers in the use of music to bridge divides, build community, and heal the wounds of war. Laura sings with one of MWB’s musical ambassadors, Fearless Rose.
Edward Horgan PhD, retired from the Irish Defence Forces with the rank of Commandant after 22 years service that included peacekeeping missions with the United Nations in Cyprus and the Middle East. He has worked on over 20 election monitoring missions in Eastern Europe, Balkans, Asia and Africa. He is international secretary with the Irish Peace and Neutrality Alliance, Chairperson and founder of Veterans For Peace Ireland, and peace activist with Shannonwatch. His many peace activities include the case of Horgan v Ireland, in which he took the Irish Government to the High Court over breaches of Irish Neutrality and U.S. military use of Shannon airport, and a high profile court case resulting from his attempt to arrest U.S. President George W. Bush in Ireland in 2004. He teaches politics and international relations part-time at the University of Limerick. He completed a PhD thesis on reform of the United Nations in 2008 and has a master’s degree in peace studies and B.A. degree in History, Politics, and Social Studies. He is actively involved in a campaign to commemorate and name as many as possible of the up to one million children who have died as a result of wars in the Middle East since the first Gulf War in 1991.
Foad Izadi is a member of World BEYOND War’s Board of Directors based in Iran. His research and teaching interests are inter-disciplinary and focus on United States-Iran relations and U.S. public diplomacy. His book, United States Public Diplomacy Towards Iran, discusses the U.S. communication efforts in Iran during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. Izadi has published numerous studies in national and international academic journals and major handbooks, including: Journal of Communication Inquiry, Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy and Edward Elgar Handbook of Cultural Security. Dr. Foad Izadi is a faculty member at the Department ofAmerican Studies, Faculty of World Studies, University of Tehran, where he teaches M.A. and Ph.D. courses in American studies. Izadi received his Ph.D. from Louisiana State University. He earned a B.S. in Economics and an M.A. in Mass Communication from University of Houston. Izadi has been a political commentator on CNN, RT (Russia Today), CCTV, Press TV, Sky News, ITV News, Al Jazeera, Euronews, IRIB, France 24, TRT World, NPR, and other international media outlets. He has been quoted in many publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, China Daily, The Tehran Times, The Toronto Star, El Mundo, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The New Yorker, and Newsweek.
Kristine Karch is a German feminist, peace and environmental activist working nationally and internationally on gender and environmental justice, on women and militarization, militarization and environment, delegitimization of NATO, nuclear weapons, and closing military bases.
She is co-chair of the international network No to War – No to NATO, a member of the Coordinating Committee of the Campaign Stop Air Base Ramstein, board member of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility (INES), and founding member and active in the women and environmental group EcoMujer, an exchange of views between women from Cuba, Latin America and Germany.
Tarak Kauff is a former U..S. Army paratrooper who served from 1959 – 1962. He is a member of Veterans For Peace, the managing editor of Peace in Our Times, VFP’s quarterly newspaper, and was a member of the VFP National Board of Directors for six years.
He has organized and led delegations of veterans to Okinawa; Jeju Island, South Korea; Palestine; Ferguson, Missouri; Standing Rock; and Ireland.
He is currently awaiting trail in Ireland along with Ken Mayers for exposing U.S. war crimes and the violation of Irish neutrality at Shannon Airport.
Peadar King is presenter / producer and occasional director of the RTÉ Global Affairs series “What in the World?”
He is author of What in the World, Political Travels in Africa, Asia and The Americas and is currently working on another book: When Elephants Fight… It’s the Grass that Suffers.
John Lannon (@jclannon) is a founding member of Shannonwatch which campaigns to end US military use of Shannon Airport (Ireland). He has co-edited ‘Shannon Airport and 21st Century War’ with Roger Cole of PANA, and has drafted submissions on the mis-use of Shannon Airport to numerous national and international bodies. He is also chairperson of Doras, an independent non-governmental organisation working to promote and protect the human rights of migrants. John is a lecturer and researcher in the Human Rights and Development Practice research group at the University of Limerick. He is co-chair of the university’s Sanctuary programme that provides access to third level education for asylum seekers and refugees.
John Maguire, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at UCC, National University of Ireland, is a board member of the peace and justice charity Afri/Action from Ireland. He has been a long-time writer and activist on the betrayal of Irish neutrality, particularly through the misuse of Shannon Airport, and against the militarisation of the EU.
He is the author of Maastricht and Neutrality (1992, with Joe Noonan), of Defending Peace: Ireland’s Role in a Changing Europe (Cork UP 2002), and of a contribution to PESCO: Irish Neutrality and the Militarisation of the EU, published in January 2019 by Clare Daly TD and others.
Mairead (Corrigan) Maguire — Nobel Peace Laureate, Co-founder, Peace People – Northern Ireland 1976 — was born in 1944, into a family of eight children in West Belfast. At 14, Mairead became a volunteer with a grass-roots lay organization and began in her free time to work in her local community. Mairead’s volunteerism, gave her the opportunity to work with families, helping to set up the first centre for disabled children, day care and youth centres for training local youth in peaceful community service. When Internment was introduced by the British Government in 1971, Mairead and her companions visited Long Kesh Internment camp to visit prisoners and their families, who were suffering deeply from many forms of violence. Mairead, was the aunt of the three Maguire children who died, in August, 1976, as a result of being hit by an IRA getaway car after its driver was shot by a British soldier. Mairead (a pacifist) responded to the violence facing her family and community by organizing, together with Betty Williams and Ciaran McKeown, massive peace demonstrations appealing for an end to the bloodshed, and a nonviolent solution to the conflict. Together, the three co-founded the Peace People, a movement committed to building a just and nonviolent society in Northern Ireland. The Peace People organized each week, for six months, peace rallies throughout Ireland and the UK. These were attended by many thousands of people, and during this time there was a 70% decrease in the rate of violence. In 1976 Mairead, together with Betty Williams, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their actions to help bring about peace and put an end to the violence arising out of the ethnic/political conflict in their native Northern Ireland. Since receiving the Nobel Peace prize Mairead has continued to work to promote dialogue, peace and disarmament both in Northern Ireland and around the world. Mairead has visited many countries, including, USA, Russia, Palestine, North/South Korea, Afghanistan, Gaza, Iran, Syria, Congo, Iraq.
Ken Mayers was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island prior to attending Princeton University. Upon graduation in 1958 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corp, eventually rising to the rank of major.
He resigned his commission in disgust with American foreign policy at the end of 1966 and returned to the University of California at Berkeley where he earned a Ph.D. in political science.
He has been a peace and justice activist ever since. He has served six years on the Veterans For Peace Board of Directors, five of them as national treasurer.
Vijay Mehta is an author and peace activist. He is Chair of Uniting for Peace and founding Trustee of Fortune Forum Charity. His notable books include ‘The Economics of Killing’ (Pluto Press, 2012) and ‘Peace Beyond Borders’ (New Internationalist, 2016). His current book is ‘How Not To Go To War’ (New Internationalist, 2019). The Sunday Times described him as a “longstanding activist for peace, development, human rights and the environment, who along with his daughter Renu Mehta has set a precedent for striving to change the world” (The Sunday Times, February 01, 2009). In 2014, Vijay Mehta’s bio “The Audacity of Dreams” appeared in the book form “Karma Kurry” published by Jaico Publishing House, India with a foreword to the book by Nelson Mandela. “Thank you for all you do Vijay – both the organisation Uniting for Peace and yourself are inspiration and give us all hope that both yourself and the organisation can bring a world without a war. Indeed it is possible, even in our own time.” – Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate 1976. “Vijay Mehta proposes in his book How Not To Go To War that in countries and communities, in governments, private institutions and media, Peace Departments and Peace Centres be established to report on and promote peace.”– Jose Ramos-Horta, Nobel Peace Laureate 1996 and Former President of Timor-Liste.
Al has participated in a wide variety of social justice issues. In 2008 he completed the nine-month JustFaith program, which focuses on building a more just and peaceful world, and discerned that he wanted to focus on issues of nonviolence, peace, and alternatives to war. He has been very active in Pax Christi and World BEYOND War. He serves as the Coordinator for the Central Florida chapter of World BEYOND War. He is also a founding member of a new chapter of Veterans For Peace. Early in his life, Al fulfilled a high school dream of receiving an appointment to attend the U.S. Air Force Academy. As a Cadet, he became disillusioned with the morality and effectiveness of war and U.S. militarism and received an Honorable Discharge from the Academy. He completed a Master of Social Work degree and spent his working career as a founder and executive with local health plans. He resides with his wife in The Villages, Florida. His four adult children and their spouses and ten children keep Al and his wife busy and traveling.
CHRIS NINEHAM
Chris Nineham is a founding member of the Stop the War Coalition. He was one of the organisers of the two-million-person February 15th, 2003 demonstration in London and central to the international co-ordination that led to the protests going global. He was also an international organiser of the Genoa G8 protests in 2001 and played a central role in the coordination of the European Social Forum in Florence (2002), Paris (2003), and London (2004) as well as being a co-ordinator of the WSF assembly of social movements. Chris Nineham writes for Stop the War and Counterfire and other outlets and appears regularly in the media.
Aine O’Gorman was a co-founding member of the successful Trinity College Dublin Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign. She subsequently worked on student mobilisation and lobbying in the successful campaign to Divest the Irish Government from Fossil Fuels. She was a co-founder of the All Ireland Student Activist Network. She is passionate about sustainability and well-being in intersectional activism that tackles the root causes of social and environmental injustices.
Tim Pluta organizes in Spain for World BEYOND War. He produced the audio book of World BEYOND War’s A Global Security System: An Alternative to War. Tim is committed to planting and cultivating seeds of nonviolent resolution of conflict. He is also committed to helping end and replace the current war economy with a Global Security System already being constructed.
Liz Remmerswaal Hughes is a member of World BEYOND War’s Board of Directors. Liz is a mother, journalist, environmentalist activist and former politician, having served six years on the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council. The daughter and granddaughter of soldiers, who fought other people’s wars in far flung places, she never got over war’s stupidity and became a pacifist. Liz is an active Quaker and formerly co Vice-President of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) Aotearoa/New Zealand. She has strong links with the Australian peace movement and the Swords into Ploughshares group.Liz prefers a creative and community approach to peacemaking, starting from within, and has enjoyed such activities as biking to the gates of the Pine Gap American military spy base in Alice Springs, Australia, planting an olive tree for peace in the Peace Palace in the Hague on the centenary of Anzac, singing peace songs outside military bases and making tea parties beside warships during the NZ Navy’s 75th birthday. In 2017 she was awarded the Sonia Davies Peace Award which enabled her to study Peace Literacy with the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara, attend the Wilpf triennial Congress in Chicago, and a workshop on Peace and Conscience in Ann Arbor. Liz lives with her husband on a wild and stony beach on the East Coast of the North Island.
John Reuwer is a member of World BEYOND War’s Board of Directors. He is a retired emergency physician whose practice convinced him of a crying need for alternatives to violence for resolving tough conflicts. This led him to the informal study and teaching of nonviolence for the last 30 years, with peace team field experience in Haiti, Colombia, Central America, Palestine/Israel, and several US inner cities. His most recent deployment has been with the Nonviolent Peaceforce, one of very few organizations practicing professional unarmed civilian peacekeeping in South Sudan, a nation whose suffering showcases the true nature of war that is so easily hidden from those who still believe war is a necessary part of politics. As adjunct professor of peace and justice studies at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, Dr. Reuwer teaches courses on conflict resolution, both nonviolent action and nonviolent communication. He also works with Physicians for Social Responsibility educating the public and politicians about nuclear weapons, which he sees as the ultimate expression of the insanity of modern war, and the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, which works to interest the world’s billion Catholics in a modern version of the early nonviolent Church.
Marc Eliot Stein is a father of three and a native New Yorker. He has been a web developer since the 1990s, and over the years has built sites for Bob Dylan, Pearl Jam, the international literary site Words Without Borders, the Allen Ginsberg estate, Time Warner, A&E Network/History Channel, the US Department of Labor, the Center for Disease Control and Meredith Digital Publishing. He is also a writer, and for years he maintained a popular literary blog called Literary Kicks using the pen name Levi Asher (he still runs the blog, but has ditched the pen name). “I’m a latecomer to political activism. It was the Iraq War and the atrocities that followed that woke me up. I’ve been exploring various tough topics on a website I launched in 2015, http://pacifism21.org. Speaking out against war can feel like shouting into a void, so I was thrilled to come to my first World BEYOND War conference (NoWar2017) and meet other people who have been active for this cause for a long time.” Marc is a member of World BEYOND War’s Board of Directors and World BEYOND War’s Technology and Social Media Director.
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is executive director of World BEYOND War and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson’s books include War Is A Lie and When the World Outlawed War, as well as Curing Exceptionalism, War Is Never Just, and War No More: The Case for Abolition. He is co-author of A Global Security System: An Alternative to War. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. Swanson was awarded the 2018 Peace Prize by the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation. David holds a Master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia and has long lived and worked in Charlottesville, Virginia. Longer bio. Sample videos. Swanson has spoken on all variety of topics related to war and peace. Find him on Facebook and Twitter.
Barry Sweeney is a member of the Board of Directors of World BEYOND War. Barry is based in Ireland, but is often in Vietnam and Italy. His background is in education and environmentalism. He taught as a primary school teacher in Ireland for a number of years, before moving to Italy in 2009 to teach English.
His love for environmental understanding led him to many progressive projects in Ireland, Italy, and Sweden. He became more and more involved in environmentalism in Ireland, and has now been teaching on a Permaculture Design Certificate course for 5 years. More recent work has seen him teaching on World BEYOND War’s War Abolition course for the last two years. Also, in 2017 and 2018 he organized peace symposia in Ireland, bringing together many of the peace/anti-war groups in Ireland.
Brian Terrell has been a peace activist for more than 40 years, beginning when he joined the Catholic Worker movement in New York City in 1975 at the age of 19. Since 1986, he has lived at Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker Farm in the rural town of Maloy, Iowa, where he gardens and raises goats and served as mayor from 1992-1995. As a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, he has travelled to Afghanistan seven times since 2010. He has also participated in delegations to Central America, Mexico, Palestine, Iraq, Bahrain, Korea and Russia and has engaged in protests at military bases around the United States and abroad, including Palmerola Air Base in Honduras, RAF Menwith Hill in the UK, Jeju Island, Korea, Vieques, Puerto Rico and most recently this summer at Buechel, Germany, where the Luftwaffe is host to twenty US B61 bombs in a NATO nuclear sharing arrangement. He has spent more than 2 years in jails and prisons as a result of these protests and has been deported from Honduras, Israel and Bahrain. In April of this year, his most recent jail term of four days in Nye County, Nevada, was for “trespass” at the Nevada Test Site, protesting the preparations for nuclear war and the storage of nuclear wastes there and in solidarity with the evicted owners of the land, the Western Shoshone National Council. In 2009, just as newly elected President Obama was making them his signature weapon, Brian was arrested and tried in Nevada as one of the “Creech 14,” the first protest of weaponized drones and remote control assassinations in the US. Since then he has organized and resisted at drone bases in Iowa, New York, California and Missouri. In recent years, with Voices for Creative Nonviolence and other friends, he has helped organize fasts, forums, vigils and civil resistance actions in New York City to end the war in Yemen at the consulates and UN missions of the US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, UK, and France, along with corporate offices of Lockheed Martin. Brian and other Voices activists have been supportive of the “Kings Bay Plowshares 7,” who go to trial in Georgia on October 21 for their disarmament action at the Trident submarine base there.
JEANNIE TOSCHI MARAZZANI VISCONTI
Jean Toschi Marazzani Visconti was born in Milan from an American mother and an Italian father. She began working as an assistant director for theatre and cinema with movie directors such as Damiano Damiani, Pietro Germi, and Eriprando Visconti. She focused later on communication, founding her own agency in 1980. In 1992, she organized the journey of writer Elie Wiesel (Nobel Peace Prize 1986) with an International Commission to Yugoslavia. Since that time Jean crossed the war fronts several times – from Croatia to Sarajevo, from the Serbian Republic of Krajina to Montenegro, up to Kosovo – meeting several protagonists of Balkan politics and witnessing crucial events such as the first NATO bombing of Serbia, in March 1999. She wrote about it in Il Manifesto, Limes, Avvenimenti, Balkan Infos, Duga, and Maiz, becoming a freelance journalist. Her books are: « Le temps du réveil » (Editions L’âge d’homme, Lausanne 1993), “Journey into the madness of a war” (Europublic, Belgrade 1994), “The corridor. Journey to Yugoslavia in war”, foreword by Aleksandr Zinov’ev (La Città del Sole 2006). For Zambon Verlag she edited “Men and not men. The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the testimony of a Yugoslav officer by Goran Jelisić” (2013) and she wrote “The entrance gate of Islam, Bosnia Herzegovina an ungovernable country”. (2016). Since 2016 she has been a member of Comitato No Guerra No NATO (CNGNN) of Italy where she is in charge of International Relations.
Dave Webb is a past-member of the World BEYOND War Coordinating Committee and chair of the UK Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and well as Vice President of the International Peace Bureau (IPB), and the Convenor of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.
Webb is an Emeritus Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Leeds Beckett University (previously Leeds Metropolitan University). Webb has been involved in the campaign to scrap the UK Trident nuclear weapons system and has also focused on campaigning to close two U.S. bases in Yorkshire (where he lives) – Fylingdales (a missile defence radar base) and Menwith Hill (the huge NSA spy base).
Dr Hakim, ( Dr. Teck Young, Wee ) is a medical doctor from Singapore who has done humanitarian and social enterprise work in Afghanistan for more than 10 years, including being a mentor to the Afghan Peace Volunteers, an inter-ethnic group of young Afghans dedicated to building non-violent alternatives to war.
He is the 2012 recipient of the International Pfeffer Peace Prize and the 2017 recipient of the Singapore Medical Association Merit Award for contributions in social service to communities.
Hakim is a member of World BEYOND War’s Advisory Board.
Greta Zarro is Organizing Director for World BEYOND War. She has a background in issue-based community organizing. Her experience includes volunteer recruitment and engagement, event organizing, coalition building, legislative and media outreach, and public speaking. Greta graduated as valedictorian from St. Michael’s College with a bachelor’s degree in Sociology/Anthropology. She then pursued a master’s in Food Studies at New York University before accepting a full-time community organizing job with leading non-profit Food & Water Watch. There, she worked on issues related to fracking, genetically engineered foods, climate change, and the corporate control of our common resources. Greta describes herself as a vegetarian sociologist-environmentalist. She is interested in the interconnections of social-ecological systems and sees the profligacy of the military-industrial complex, as part of the larger corporatocracy, as the root of many cultural and environmental ills. She and her partner currently live in an off-grid tiny home on their organic fruit and vegetable farm in Upstate New York.
